How Amazon Sellers Can Capitalize on Prime Day
Amazon.com’s Prime Day is tomorrow, and retailers will need to be prepared for the tidal wave of purchasing activity on Amazon. In honor of the e-commerce behemoth’s 20th birthday, Amazon plans to host a day of crazy sales and giveaways, with sales forecast to be greater than on Black Friday.
Third-party Amazon sellers stand to lose a lot if they're not prepared for Prime Day. With the right preparation, sellers have the opportunity for exposure to countless new customers, incredible boosts in Buy Box placement and, of course, huge profits.
Anticipating the madness for immense sales and overflow of activity is the first step to ensuring success. So what can third-party Amazon sellers do to be prepared? They need to be ready for inflated, fast-paced sales. They must be ready for competitive prices so extreme they'll be like never before. And above all, they need to do their homework and prepare themselves in every way possible.
Luckily, there’s a few concrete, actionable steps sellers can (and should!) take to ensure total preparation:
1. Fill up on inventory. Sales are going to shoot through the roof on Prime Day. Running out of stock early means losing out on the chance for mega profits on what's potentially the most profitable day of your year. Make sure your shelves are well-stocked and your most lucrative items are piled high.
2. Foolproof your pricing strategy. Price wars to the bottom will be rampant and drastic in the mad rush for sales. Sellers, especially small ones, frequently forget to properly account for their margins, markups and operational costs, and therefore price their items too low to make a profit. On a normal day this can cost you money, but on Prime Day it can cost you your business. Come armed with a pricing strategy that's soundly based on your total costs and concrete pricing limits.
3. Clean up and update your listings. There's a good chance you'll get more exposure on Prime Day than on any other day in the year. You want your product listings to look their absolute best and be as updated as possible. This is the ideal time to do a quality check on your product pictures, descriptions and anything else that can make or break a sale.
4. Clear out leftover stock. Have some inventory hanging around that you just can't seem to get rid of? Now is the perfect time! Millions of shoppers will be itching to spend money, so give them a good excuse. Make that stubborn stock look as attractive as possible with huge discounts, special offers or whatever else you can think of to get it sold.
Bottom line: Amazon Prime Day promises to be the busiest day of any Amazon seller’s year. A seller’s performance on Prime Day can essentially make or break their year. It’s the responsibility of sellers to be absolutely 100 percent certain that they’ve done everything humanly possible to be prepared for this crucial day.
Good luck, and happy selling!
Shmuli Goldberg is the director of marketing for Feedvisor, an algorithmic pricing and business intelligence platform for online retailers.
